Netflix Resident Evil Review: a familiar story with untapped potential - The Verge

Netflix’s Resident Evil series — out July 14th — pulls together different pieces of the classic video game lore to create an unwieldy chimera of a story.

Similar to how the fictional Umbrella Corporation struggled for years to understand the mutagenic T-virus, Capcom has spent decades trying to figure out how to produce live-action Resident Evil adaptations with broad appeal outside of the video games’ core fanbase. Netflix’s new Resident Evil series from Supernatural writer Andrew Dabb is wily and full of alarming surprises that speak to its potential to become a breakout hit. But much like the T-virus, the new show is as inconsistent as it is imaginative with an apocalyptic story that blends different pieces of Resident Evil’s past together as it creates a new future for some of the franchise’s most iconic characters.

Netflix’s Resident Evil tells the story of a slightly different yet very familiar version of Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick), one of Umbrella’s top executives who’s been overseeing the development of its latest pharmaceutical breakthrough — a drug dubbed “Joy.” With just a little bit more fine-tuning, Umbrella’s new multipurpose drug Joy could rid the world of depression and anxiety and make the corporation billions of dollars in the process. But, as tends to be the case with Umbrella’s miracle drugs derived from the T-virus, there are certain… complications that can develop from taking Joy, which is why this iteration of Wesker — a family man — wants to keep it off shelves.

Wesker’s tenuous morality makes him something of an unexpected hero as Resident Evil opens sometime in 2022, which is actually the series’ past. But as the show jumps back and forth in time between 2022 and its present day in 2036, Resident Evil gradually reveals that it’s really a story about Weskers’ fraternal twin daughters — two characters who were created for the new show.

The Wesker sisters getting a taste of what their father does for work

    Image: Netflix
  

Though Resident Evil feels most on-brand when it’s following adult Jade Wesker (Ella Balinska) on her full on-apocalyptic journey to better understand the T-virus after the pathogen gets loose, the show’s at its most interesting in 2022 when it’s focusing on younger versions of Jade (Tamara Smart) and her sister Billie (Adeline Rudolph). It’s through the teen girls’ tense relationship with their father that the show first begins to drop clues about its connections to the larger Resident Evil franchise and how, different as things seem at first, looks are often deceiving when the Umbrella Corporation is involved.

Resident Evil finds a variety of different ways to play with this concept as it details how the Wesker family comes to settle in New Raccoon City, an eerie and somewhat exclusive township located in South Africa. Strange as the girls — two fraternal twins who’ve never been sick — find their new town, they understand that relocating there and providing their father with weekly blood samples are all part of Albert’s desire to keep them happy and safe. Out of the handful of classic Resident Evil characters from the games that Netflix’s show incorporates into its story, Albert is by far its most fascinating thanks largely to the steely, menacing energy Reddick brings to the role with his performance. As Resident Evil progresses, Reddick’s Wesker is shown in a variety of contrasting lights that do an effective job of illustrating why he became one of Umbrella’s power players and why his presence at the company puts powerful executives like Evelyn Marcus (Paola Núñez) on edge.

https://www.theverge.com/23186343/netflix-resident-evil-series-review

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